


miles to go before i sleep

by sinaddict



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Community: help_haiti, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinaddict/pseuds/sinaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The possibilities are never far from Claire's mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	miles to go before i sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Set between 2x12 ("The Hollow Men") and "Epitaph One." For [kryptocow](http://kryptocow.livejournal.com/) for [help_haiti](http://community.livejournal.com/help_haiti).

_ECHO: Glad to see the doctor back in the house. Didn't expect to after they fixed your face. How'd that happen?  
CLAIRE: It's a long story._  
 

I. DISSONANCE

Topher's screaming quiets to intermittant whimpering with the sedatives. Adelle drops the syringe and wraps both arms around him, gently stroking his hair and murmuring comforting words as Claire stands just out of sight, around the doorway, to listen. Shaking, thoroughly unsettled by this episode, Claire wracks her brain for possible triggers and comes up empty. Topher seemed to be having a good day, and Claire has long since learned the signs of a bad day well enough to spot one coming. (Or she thought she had, at least.) He'd even been willing to venture up to his former office in search of snack foods, accompanied by a rather indulgent Lima.

Then Topher had caught sight of her standing in the doorway.

Her (fake) memory is riddled with holes. She remembers the aftermath of discovering she was a doll, but now how she actually made the discovery. She knows that reacted to the discovery badly--hacking Topher's systems, leaving lab rats in his cupboards--but she has no memory of planning or carrying out her petty revenges. Every memory she has of those events is from Topher's point of view, carefully integrated from a copy of his imprint into her own.

_The first real memory, the first she can trust as her own: DeWitt looking down at her, unusually drawn and tired, as the click-whirl of the chair shutting down brushed some ingrained instinct to ask if she fell asleep. She didn't ask, but only because seeing Victor imprinted as Topher was incongruous enough that she couldn't fully process it quickly enough to speak._

There's a strange sense of unreality when she tries to access Topher's memories, as if her mind can't fully accept the alternate viewpoint and pretends they're photographs or videos she's seen of someone else. She sometimes wonders if it's similar to what Echo feels when accessing old imprints. (Those memories are Topher's, too. She hasn't seen Echo since being imprinted again.) The limitations of her knowledge are bound by the limitations of his when the imprint was made. For anything after, she has to rely on the answers from Adelle, or Tony, or Priya.

She has no idea whether they're being truthful or simply telling her the sanitized version.

Sometime before she was restored--as Adelle calls it despite it being more of a re-imprinting--Topher (or possibly Topher's imprint, Claire has never been quite clear on the matter) altered the chair's interface to allow for random memory access from the wedges. Random being the operative word; the problem with the new interface is that nobody other than Topher understands the filing system. Tony was of the opinion that the tech could be useful in the long run, so he and Claire took turns testing and recording results in search of a pattern. Claire imprinted herself with several alternately mundane, fascinating, and truly bizarre memories from the assortment of backup wedges still available before Adelle found out and put a stop to further experiments.

The possibilities are never far from Claire's mind, though.  
 

II. ELISION

Tony is the only former active in the house still willing to be imprinted if the necessity arises.

Claire can't call her own motives a necessity, but her reasoning is sound enough that Adelle agrees. It had taken a maximum dosage of sedatives to get Topher near his old office, much less in the chair for a backup. They'd only attempted it after everyone else had already gone through the process, and even then, only because she'd argued that Topher's mind--fractured as it might be--was by far the most likely to find a way to save them all.

The new Topher imprint is unstable; the only person who can integrate the knowledge in the new imprint with the stability of the old imprint is Topher himself. Ergo, they need to imprint an active with the old imprint to make the necessary changes.

It sounds logical in her head until she's confronted with Topher's speech and mannerisms coming from Tony. "Why am I a doll?" the panicked pacing, the hand gestures, it's all so exactly the Topher from before, the Topher whose memories she can play like movies, that Claire is once again struck speechless for the first few moments. "Oh, god, I'm dead, aren't I?! Wait, what're you doing back here? What happened to your face? No, that's not as important as--how'd I die?"

"Wait, wait," Claire holds up a hand to stem the questions and gathers her thoughts. "You're not dead. You're on vacation." The lie is easy, practiced; Adelle has created a kind of script for the initial interactions with Topher's imprint. Instead of _did I fall asleep?/for a little while_, it's _oh, god, I'm dead/no, you're on vacation_.

"I don't take vacations," he says suspiciously.

"DeWitt didn't give you a choice," she responds with a slight smile. Adelle's script for this response--and her expression while relating it to Claire--was simply too perfectly Topher for it not to have happened at some point. "Something about an experiment with the environmental systems controls that set off the sprinklers in her office."

"Huh," he pauses, fingers drumming against his lips briefly as he considers this. "Was she in her office when--"

"Yes."

"Oh... So, I'm on vacation!"

Claire wants to smile, but instead rolls her eyes slightly. This version of Topher would find her amusement in his antics worrying. "We have some work we need done immediately, but DeWitt doesn't to call you back just for this." She explains away the instability of his new imprint by telling him that it was damaged when a power surge fried the chair's circuits. It's not a great explanation, but it's mundane enough that he doesn't question it too much.

She watches him work, carefully. Interjects idle questions amid the ones that she desperately needs the answers to, and he's thankfully distracted enough with the imprint wedges and monitors to realize that he's essentially giving a lecture on the database structure he uses to categorize memories on the wedges.

When he finishes, she says with calm belying the knots twisting her stomach, "We should test the integrity before we wipe you." He looks up, startled, and seems to consider her words for a moment, so she continues, "The initial imprint will work regardless, but we need to make sure that the new memories are accessible or we'll have to start over."

He's somewhat less than enthusiastic about imprinting his own memories into her. There's a fair bit of flailing and gesticulating and a moderately entertaining rant about his right to privacy in his own mind that even he seems to realize is more than a little ironic. "I'm not asking you to test the whole imprint on me," she argues when he finally winds down. "Pick one or two memories you integrated from the new imprint and we'll see if they're accessible. That's it."

She wins, although she suspects it's mostly because she tells him that he already gave her some of his memories--it's close enough to the truth--so what's a few more? Steeling herself as the chair reclines back, she catches the way his gaze softens before everything flashes to white.  
 

III. (DIS)INTEGRATION

The memories from Topher's point of view are no longer like movies. Sometimes, she's utterly convinced that they're her own, that these things happened to her. Sometimes, she finds herself relating anecdotes to Lima or Oscar while patching up minor training injuries, only to realize halfway through that they're Topher's anecdotes.

Sometimes, she wakes from Topher's nightmares, calling for a woman she never met, a woman she loved, a woman she killed.

It's one of those nights, one of those nightmare nights, where she snaps awake feeling blood and brain tissue spatter across her face, and she finds herself wandering down toward the deserted sleep chambers. (Topher's the only one who will sleep in the pods. The former actives seem uniformly claustrophobic about them.) The hardwood flooring is cool beneath her bare feet, the silence and stillness of the night interrupted only by the sound of Tony's combat boots striking the floor softly as he conducts a patrol of the upper floor.

Topher's still awake when she slips into the room, glancing up from the notebook he's scribbling in by candlelight. "Nightmares?"

"Yes." An odd sort of balance now: her bad nights are his good ones, and her good days are his worst. They've become more extreme since Paul and Echo came back, especially with all the talk of venturing out into what's left of the world. Carefully, she sidesteps the candles as he sets the notebook aside. The pods weren't built for two people, but neither of them are whole anymore. Curling into his side, she says, "Sleep is important to be your best."

He sighs.

Every time she imprints memories from someone else, she loses a bit of Claire. In the immediate aftermath, she tends to fall back on those deeply ingrained instincts that Topher hid beneath layers and layers of created personality. He hates when she's not Claire enough, she remembers now. "Sorry," she whispers, fragments coming together before splitting off in new directions. "It's all still too new."

It doesn't make sense, but Topher understands.

"Can I fix you?" he asks, his lips barely whispering over her now-unscarred forehead with each word. "Can I fix you, or did I break you?"

"We broke each other."  
 

IV. PENANCE

All the others are gone, but new people are here now. She has a mission. She has to be her best.

She likes to sit in his pod, surrounded by his things. Trailing her fingers over the books and papers piled around her, tracing the shapes of scribbled letters and math signs on the walls that she can't understand. There are flashes sometimes, but only in here, in his space. Faces, names, the sound of a particular voice. She has to stay here. She might remember.

_"You're better than that!"_

The little one calls her "Dr. Saunders," and something in the back of her mind clicks even as she replies, "My name is Whiskey."

She has a mission. (She's a person, not a Roomba.)

When she asks if she was her best, the little one tells her, "You were better."

_"You're better than me!"_

They have to go. All the new people always have to go. That's why she's here--to help them go. That little bit of someone else, someone not Whiskey, reminds her about the switches. She has a mission. She has to help them go.

The smoke floats out over the first floor. She can't go back to the pods. Settling herself against the railing, she lets her mind drift in images of hazel eyes, bright and focused.

She tries to be her best.


End file.
